18 Dec. Metaverse for December. Beginning the Historical Atlas of Skouras. This is a Flash file, so get a Flash reader if you live in a cave. Ten maps are up; I'll be adding two maps a week till it's done.

20 Apr. Entirely rewrote my article on what's wrong with libertarianism. : it now takes twice as long to arrive at the same conclusion! (The major changes are to show that yes, people really do say this stuff; to avoid sidebars that no one seemed to read; and to respond to some criticisms.)

11 Mar. Jeffrey Henning was so anxious to see an RSS feed for zompist.com that he created the initial file for me. That's pretty hard to resist. Supposedly the little XML button above will do something for you RSS types.

29 Sep. Added nav bars all over Virtual Verduria. Converted a bunch of it to Unicode, corrected typos, finally added some text about that room, redrew some drawings, and added some Kebreni words. Oh, and added a new religion.

10 Jul. I know, not much has been happening here. I just finished a large paid project, so that should free up some time... though not quite yet; I'm on vacation for a week. There's three new pages at Shrove Tuesday (Observed).

14 Jun. Minor changes to the numbers page (a language named Lou turns out to be Austronesian,
not Indo-Pacific).

I got a nice blurb in the Chicago Tribune Magazine a couple of weeks ago.
Even neater: Neil Gaiman answered my
question in his journal; I'm tickled by this, as I assume he gets dozens of questions and answers only
a few of them. I was hoping he'd provide examples, but I note that his answer is, well,
very Gaiman: he zeroes in on a specific, slightly odd fact (the D's become S's).

2003

28 Dec. Changed things around at the numbers page a bit. The numbers are stored in two ways: in a mondo 1.1M file, and in a set of 14 smaller files. The bigger file will now use Unicode (as much as my computers can display), which makes it look a lot better; the smaller files will remain in standard html only; I'm assuming those of you who connect to the net with toasters can't handle either large files or Unicode. Also added a few sets of numbers.

7 May. Converted the Proto-Eastern page to
Unicode; improved some table formatting; 'Sheo' is now 'Teôši';
corrected the statement that some Obenzayet infinitives end in -r.

5 May. Not much new here, not least because a lot of my energy has gone to
setting up Shrove Tuesday (Observed),
a new site featuring the humor stylings of Lore, Spinn, Agent Orange, Raven,
Tieboy, SeanQ, Bob, and me.
New rant, though.

7 Feb. Everything seems to be back to normal. Here's what's been
happening: RCN decided to move everyone from its old Enteract servers
to RCN servers. Only RCN's web hosting has a limit of 10M; I use about 40M.
So only about half the site was transferred. (With no notice of any kind.)

Well. The simplest solution was to upgrade to their 'Bronze' package,
which fortunately isn't much more expensive, and offers 150M.
There were some permissions problems this afternoon; but that's been
cleared up.

So everything should be up now. If you get a missing file somewhere,
tell me.

2002

24 Dec. Revised the paper on chance resemblances between languages, expanding the discussion of multiple counting methodologies (with, finally, a formula to calculate them), adding a graphic to make the connection to the normal curve obvious, relegating a dull discussion of equiprobable phonemes to an appendix, discussing more ways to calculate phonetic matches, and addressing more issues in semantics.

6 Jul. New rant. A few new numbers; see the sources page for the changes.
Corrected a number of typos in the Verdurian grammar. Updated the
Verdurian dictionaries and the Cadhinor lexicon.
Corrected more typos in the French version of the numbers page.

26 Feb. The language classification for Amerindian languages in the numbers list has been
thoroughly revised to follow Lyle Campbell's American Indian Languages (1997). This means a lot of languages moved around, a few changed names, dialect status, or (sadly) became extinct, and a few new dialects were added.
The most noticeable difference, however, is that Campbell is an extreme splitter, where Ruhlen is an extreme lumper-- Campbell has well over 200 families where Ruhlen has just 3. I have kept quite a few of Campbell's families next to their traditional or Ruhlenian relatives (e.g. Hokan, Penutian, Andean, Equatorial), mostly for convenience, and so that the image map still works. Don't expect these groups to be resuscitated by future research; some are simply hopeless, and others will very likely be greatly rearranged-- e.g. note that Campbell places Cariban with Tupi,
not (like Ruhlen) with Ge and Pano. In general, North and Central American families are well studied, and South American ones are still up for grabs.

22 Jan. J. Leavitt sent me a cute picture of Oruseon and Rhavcaëna, two of the Cadhinorian gods. (He drew Fidra too, but that picture as a bit incomplete.) Thanks, mon!

21 Jan. Added three new French comics; clarified my odd description of German verbs in the Language Construction Kit; explained
the almost-regular u to o change in English spelling. Made some corrections to the Verdurian-English dictionary.

12 Jan. Tieboy wanted a small ad (this one is 150 x 50 pixels) for zompist.com, and maybe someone
else does. You can include a clickable ad by including the html to the right;
change "zlogo" to "zlogo2" to get the second ad.

2001

30 Dec. Added (a revised version of) John Minot's translation of The Hollow Men to the Verdurian texts. Corrections to Visitor's Guide (no mules) and Kingdom of Verduria page (named avisar students; weight of gold in table was wrong; added a Cadhinorian coin); added a note on alphabetization to the Verdurian-English dictionary.

23 Dec. Took advantage of the long weekend and the feverish intensity of
a cold to finish off the Historical Atlas (four new maps). Also redid the map of Ereláe in the Drilldown. Corrected the languages names on the map on proto-Eastern page.

18 Dec. Uploaded the English-Verdurian dictionary, and updated links to reflect this. Removed the Word versions of the dictionaries, to save bandwidth.

16 Dec. Two new Atlas maps (3410, 3480), which take us up to the Almean present; still, there are a few more maps to go. And a new rant.

12 Dec. A half dozen or so new or corrected number sets. I reset the change colors on the sources page, so it currenty
indicates what's new since Oct 2. Corrected some typos on the French translation of the numbers page, and hopefully fixed some lexical errors in the Portuguese Language Contruction Kit.

8 Nov. Changed a couple dozen words in Cadhinor and Verdurian.
Details, for those few who will care, on the message board.

7 Nov. Corrected a typo in the Ismaîn grammar (reference to an earlier form of the pronoun si). Several corrections to the Cadhinor grammar, including errors in the verb conjugation tables for -R verbs, and a bad choice of sample verbs.

5 Nov. Found a better example of <ph> != /f/ for the spelling document. Improved an example in the how-to document in Virtual Verduria (the antialiasing example didn't work so well with a background gradient!).

2 Oct. Additions and corrections to the numbers list. As usual, see
the sources file for what changed. Fixed some typos in the Verdurian lessons (hutor was sometimes used for 'farmer' not 'farm'; and a couple pronouns were wrong in the Lesson 3 text.

1 Oct. Metaverse for October. Added an interview with Chris, a.k.a. tieboy, the man behind Not My Desk; a page of facts from my bookshelf, and a Cadhinor lexicon. Added two maps (1645 and a map of Europe superimposed on Ereláe) to the Atlas. Corrected some errors in the Cadhinor examples. Added a new rant. Some sf references added to the sci.lang FAQ.

Corrected a redundancy in the sci.lang FAQ. Corrected a typo in
the Kingdom of Verduria page (a misspelled Verdurian word) and made the schooling table easier to read. Changed the JavaScript in the Atlas to make it work for Linux browsers.

31 Aug. Metaverse for September. Finally got a new Fuschia comic done. I kind of wish I could show it to you as JPEGs-- the colors are more gorgeous-- but the bandwidth is high enough already. Also: a culture test for Italy, by Riccardo Distasi.

1 Aug. Yeeks. All fifty pages of Virtual
Verduria were modified-- mostly to add a logo, implement a single exploration path (follow the "Onward!" icons), and fix some HTML that IE4 liked but
IE5 chokes on. There's a new map on the Almea
page, and a map of non-humans on Almea (as well
as some added facts on ktuvoks and flaids) on the biology page.

13 Jul. Corrected some typos and thinkos in the Kebreni grammar,
and updated it with new words. (Thanks to Philip Newton; not many people
would be capable of finding a typo in a table of Kebreni verbs.)
Also, there's a new rant.

7 May. New rant; new picture on the Sandman review. New pages are coming, hold your horses.

6 May. Cited a book on Whorf in the sci.lang FAQ.

2 May. Came back from vacation to find that I'd been laid off.
Anyone in the Chicago area looking for an experienced C/C++ programmer...?
(Corollary: markrose@spss.com is no longer a good way
to contact me.)

Added a new rant, and a couple of Indian words (coho and pirogue).

17 Apr. New rant.

16 Apr. Changed all the mailto links to point to my
new contact page. And I'll repeat the main
bit of news here: I'm on vacation till the end of April, so
correspondance will be delayed more than usual.

2 Apr. Added a couple of band names.
And God knows why outsiders would want to follow our D&D game, but we have that technology.
I also reformatted some Fuschia comics
to follow Scott McCloud's advice: the computer screen is not a comic book page...

20 Sep. About thirty more numbers... finally processing the backlog.
For fellow number freaks who really need to know which ones are new:
look at the sources page, view the source of the
page, and do a search for "# 0ffff" (that is, red text!).

18 Sep. Irgend also translated the Zompist Phrasebook into German, so you can now get in trouble in three languages. Also made two corrections to the German culture test (on vacations and Bavarians).

Also updated the election guide today, made some format changes and added some answers to frequent questions in the Language Construction Kit,
and corrected an inaccurate statement about German grammar there.

More numbers: a bunch of conlangs, two West Atlantic sets, two
newly described Vietnamese languages (one Tibeto-Burman, one Kadai). There are now more than 4500 languages and dialects.

5 Sep. Thanks to Irgend Jemand, the election guide is now available
in German.

18 Aug. Used Unicode instead of a special font on the spelling guide; also added
some information from Hirofumi Nagamura on ginkgo, and pointed out a dialect
variation on rule 29a. And since I learned how,
everyone should: Added a link to the sci.lang FAQ to a page on representing IPA in Unicode.

16 Aug. Added some world-building links to the Language Construction Kit (check the bottom of the page).
Corrected a phonological error in Verdurian (I didn't know that German Hüte has a different vowel than Hütte).
Explained the term fixed air.
Thanks to alert readers Evan Meyer and Jurgen Mifsud for the last two.

11 Aug. Made some corrections to the spelling guide, in response
to several people's comments.

4 Jul. Metaverse for July. Added a culture test for England. It's great
when people write stuff for me. Don't we have any Dutch, Chinese, or Iranian people
out there who want to do one?

28 Jun. Improved the translation of a couple lines in one of Faye's songs-- thanks, Laurie and Eugene.

20 Jun. At Irgend's request, added a line to the German culture test. No time to do anything else... too busy playing Civilization II.

9 Jun. Added some links to the embassy page; corrected a typo in the Zeir story, and updated the Spinnland map.

7 Jun. Changed main page to highlight new stuff a bit more. Updated the graphic to the American culture page, and added a link to a site that presents the same material by subject. Updated the election guide.

28 Mar. The sources page for the numbers
list is now automatically generated from my master list, rather than
maintained separately and laboriously. What this means for you, the
reader, is that there's a good deal more information available, including titles of sources and notes on classification. I divided out the language family information that used to be scattered among the sources.

22 Mar. Added some conlangs; corrected a bug in the numbers processing
program that merged left and right quotes. Updated the Kebreni page. Improved the discussion of consonants and vowels in the Language Construction Kit; made some other changes in the Kit.

19 Mar. Added some more IE, creole, and Berber numbers, and corrected
some typos in the Amerindian section; also added some more band names.

6 Mar. Finally added some new numbers (mostly South American, Iranian
and other IE, Omotic, and constructed).

28 Feb. Metaverse for March. The new Fuschia
comic is finally done; she also now has a page of her own. Since I had to buy a new computer to work with the new scanner to
finish this, this is the most expensive comic, in dollars per page, ever.
But hey, the computer is really nice.

17 Nov. Added a bunch of numbers, in various areas; there are now over 4400 sets.
Also, Marnen Laibow-Koser pointed out a mistranslation on the Modern Verdurian page-- St. Petersburg should be Nëron Petro, not Nëron Pavel. D'oh!

17 Jan. Updated the pages on the Wede:i language
with a map and description of the writing system.

11 Jan. The big move to www.zompist.com. My new domain is
finally up. I moved all the files and put signposts on the tezcat
pages in hopes of luring some of the visitors there over here.
Also updated the French comics page.

1998

17 Dec. Added a couple more rock bands
and changed a reference in the FAQ.

Added some information to the Numbers source page, based on Dixon, on which language families are well established (by application of the comparative method) and which are speculative; and mentioned Dixon's analysis of Australia as a linguistic equilibrium area.